Re: Evolution Supported by the Bible?


"loiner2003" <loiner2003@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7n2fu9F3kc58sU2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Gareth McCaughan wrote:
Eric Potts wrote:
But it seems to me that the rules of physics require that every event
has a cause (except, perhaps but only perhaps, the Big Bang).

I see no reason to think that they require any such thing.


Interesting. All this shows, I suspect, how poorly quantum ideas are
understood outside the scientific community. This is presumably because:
- the concepts themselves are so different from previous ones that they
are hard to understand anyway;
- very few people have a high level of mathematical knowledge;
- scientists have on the whole been pretty poor at explaining themselves!

I would have thought that the idea that for every effect there must be a
cause was still pretty widely held. If that is not so, then a vast area of
philosophy, theology and general cultural thinking needs to have a major
overhaul.


There are two related concepts which have a bearing on this; realism and
causality. Realism (in Physics) holds that objects and systems have
properties whose values are independent of whether we observe or measure
them. Causality holds that all events are causally connected to other events
and that given sufficent knowledge and computational power we could in
principle predict any future event. Clearly we cannot have causality without
realism. If objects have properties which do not have set/determined values
then we can't use those values in our calculations without measuring them -
in which case we end-up with a self-fulfilling prediction.

Einstein objected to the Copenhagen interpretation of QM on the grounds that
it was either not realistic or else it required information to be exchanged
at faster than light-speed. Since he wasn't prepared to accept either of
these possibilities he argued that QM must be incomplete and that there must
be some further variables hidden away somewhere whose values determined the
outcome of QM measurements. This matter was the subject of a long and heated
exchange between Einstein (along with his colleagues Rosen and Podolsky) and
Neils Bohr and others and resulted in the famous EPR experiment being
proposed by Einstein et al to show the absurdity of current QM models. This
experiment was mostly considered to be another of Einstein's thought
experiments (like the famous train experiments which Einstein used to
illustrate special relativity). However the British mathematician John Bell
showed in 1964 how the EPR experiment could in principle be realised. And in
1972 the French scientist Alain Aspect managed to perform the first EPR
experiement. Many variations on this experiment have now been performed in
order to counter criticisms and the result is now largely accepted by most
physicists: Einstein was wrong and QM is indeed correct - there are no
hidden variables and the Universe is not locally realistic!

What this means is that physical events are not fully determined by other
events in their local neighbourhood and time. Local here has a very specific
meaning which relates to Einstein's relativity and in particular the fact
that information cannot be transmitted at faster than light speed. It does
not in itself rule out realism - the universe could still be fully
determined, but only in a global (in space and time) sense, not a local
sense.

Thanks
Thomas



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